Jude the Obscure
Features in JUDE THE OBSCURE by Thomas Hardy
In the recent novel of Hardy, Jude the Obscure, the characters are in an everlasting illusion about truth and their language is not only a transparent means of communication but a kind of obstacle to perceive each other's meaning. On the other hand, by generating a new sense of religious faith he demolishes the traditional idea of faith and Christianity and let the characters and especially women breathe under the given liberty which is achieved by this loss of faith and moreover captured in a loneliness that is the direct outcome of the new philosophy. All Hardy's desires are encoding new moral standards within the society which is bound to traditions. The first difficulty in understanding the novel as a Victorians buildung novel is thematic and stems from the portrayal in the text itself of misreading that have been done by Jude. Jude sees in Christ minster and its university the image of an achievable ideal world. His desire for this ideal vision involves a rejection of reality. For his own occasionally controlled and some times partially understood world, he substitutes the image of a unified, stable, and understandable world. Delighted for his desire for order, he starts by studying language with two purposes one as a means of entering to university life and as a possible way of establishing a firm character. Jude feels betrayed. Consequently, in his attempt to learn Latin he finds that "there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had supposed" (Nineteenth century fiction. p, 31). Jude's desire of "law of transmutation," the "secret cipher" to a system of translation could exist only if a prior permanent code existed to allow a free substitution of signifiers for one autonomous signified. The metaphor of translation at this early point in the novel is very interesting. It both reveals that Jude's desire for an unexcited frozen text that its content might be transported without
In the recent novel of Hardy, Jude the Obscure, the characters are in an everlasting illusion about truth and their language is not only a transparent means of communication but a kind of obstacle to perceive each other's meaning. On the other hand, by generating a new sense of religious faith he demolishes the traditional idea of faith and Christianity and let the characters and especially women breathe under the given liberty which is achieved by this loss of faith and moreover captured in a loneliness that is the direct outcome of the new philosophy. All Hardy's desires are encoding new moral standards within the society which is bound to traditions. The first difficulty in understanding the novel as a Victorians buildung novel is thematic and stems from the portrayal in the text itself of misreading that have been done by Jude. Jude sees in Christ minster and its university the image of an achievable ideal world. His desire for this ideal vision involves a rejection of reality. For his own occasionally controlled and some times partially understood world, he substitutes the image of a unified, stable, and understandable world. Delighted for his desire for order, he starts by studying language with two purposes one as a means of entering to university life and as a possible way of establishing a firm character. Jude feels betrayed. Consequently, in his attempt to learn Latin he finds that "there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had supposed" (Nineteenth century fiction. p, 31). Jude's desire of "law of transmutation," the "secret cipher" to a system of translation could exist only if a prior permanent code existed to allow a free substitution of signifiers for one autonomous signified. The metaphor of translation at this early point in the novel is very interesting. It both reveals that Jude's desire for an unexcited frozen text that its content might be transported without